'Liz & Dick' review: How Lohan can you go?

TELEVISION

Updated 8:02 pm, Thursday, November 22, 2012

Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler play Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who married and divorced twice.

Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler play Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who married and divorced twice.

Photo: Jack Zeman, Lifetime

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Grant Bowler and Lindsay Lohan play the tumultuous couple, who met on the "Cleopatra" set.

Grant Bowler and Lindsay Lohan play the tumultuous couple, who met on the "Cleopatra" set.

Photo: Adam Taylor, Lifetime

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"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

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"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

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"Liz & Dick." AP Photo/Lifetime, Richard McLaren

"Liz & Dick." AP Photo/Lifetime, Richard McLaren

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"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

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"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

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"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

"Liz & Dick." Lifetime photo.

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'Liz & Dick' review: How Lohan can you go?

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Liz & Dick: Drama, 9 p.m. Sunday Lifetime.

Lifetime's "Liz & Dick" is highly anticipated, as they say - anticipated in the way a boulder falling toward the head of Wile E. Coyote is anticipated in a Road Runner cartoon.

The film, starring Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler and airing Sunday night, is terrible. It could have been terrible in a fun way, but is, alas, terrible in the other way: It's so terrible, you'll need to ice your face when it's over to ease the pain of wincing for two hours.

The film purports to tell the story of the tumultuous relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and does so in Lifetime's trademark way: superficially and with little credibility.

Taylor and Burton took an instant dislike to each other when they met on the set of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's overproduced 1963 film "Cleopatra," and then did an about-face and scandalized the world with their affair. The Welsh-born Burton was married to long-suffering Sybil Burton at the time, while Taylor had landed Eddie Fisher as her fourth husband, destroying his marriage to "America's Sweetheart," Debbie Reynolds, in the process.

Taylor and Burton married and divorced twice, made several bad films together ("The VIPs," "Boom"), one fairly entertaining Shakespearean film ("The Taming of the Shrew") and one great film ("Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"). A few years after their second divorce, they reunited for a Broadway and touring production of Noel Coward's "Private Lives." It was terrible, too, but in the fun way that "Liz & Dick" is not.

The Lifetime film begins in Switzerland in 1984, the last day of Burton's life. Unfortunately, he doesn't die in time to miss the flashback to the "Cleopatra" set where his younger self meets Taylor. Once the affair gets going, the two are besieged by paparazzi. The ham-fisted script by Christopher Monger ("Temple Grandin") helpfully informs us that "paparazzi" was coined by Federico Fellini. This is also one of the film's many failed attempts at achieving some credibility by tossing in historical factoids.

Taylor and Burton devour each other and everyone around them. They drink too much, they fight and make love in equal portions, they spend too much, and they have little to no concern about the rest of the world. They are spoiled children, self-indulgent to a fault.

Between chronological scenes, the film cuts away to Burton and Taylor chatting with each other and us about their relationship. Both are dressed in black, sitting on director's chairs, smoking. Are they supposed to be participating in a documentary of some kind? And if so, when in their relationship is it happening?

Well, spoiler alert, for what it's worth: They're dead, which may have something to do with why they're getting on so well.

The performances range from barely adequate to terrible. That would be Bowler in the "barely adequate" slot and Lohan, well, in the other one.

From a distance, and perhaps more so when she was younger and her notorious partying hadn't started to show on her face, Lohan bears a certain resemblance to Taylor. But it's not enough by half to make her credible here. For one thing, virtually no attempt has been made to reflect Taylor's physicality. Unlike Lohan, she had hips. And at certain times during the period the film covers, she had a lot more than that. The re-created scene from "Virginia Woolf" is absurd: It's as though Burton is trading barbs with a 14-year-old boy in drag.

Figure never changes

Elsewhere, to atone for describing Taylor's fingers as pudgy, Burton buys her that huge diamond. Later, Taylor throws a weeping fit when the press calls her "Cleo-fat-tra." The problem with all of this is that Lohan's figure as Taylor looks exactly the same in every scene, making the dialogue even more nonsensical than it is on the page.

Apparently, despite the money saved by all the fake location shots in Rome and Portofino, there wasn't enough left in the budget to get padding to fill out Lohan's figure.

Lohan also doesn't sound much like Taylor. The actress' voice is ragged and dry, where Taylor's voice was high and rather lyrical, unless she wanted to allow herself to cackle and bellow.

But in the hands of a skilled actress, speech and looks could be overcome with a credible performance, a performance that found the common thread between the two actresses. Lohan knows what it's like to be hounded by the press and the subject of scandal.

She also knows what it's like for one's craft not to be taken seriously because of those scandals. Yet she doesn't seem to mine any of that. Her attempts at re-creating Taylor's signature temper flareups are wan and unconvincing, and she fails repeatedly at embodying the star presence that Taylor had fine-tuned over a lifetime in front of the camera and in the public spotlight.

One scene in the film is especially telling: Burton is opening in "Hamlet" on Broadway. Every seat in the theater is filled, save one. Burton is peeking out through the curtain to see if his wife has arrived. All of a sudden, the rest of the audience turns to look behind them: Taylor has arrived.

But instead of Taylor, we get Lohan, taking her seat on the aisle while the rest of the audience turns to watch the curtain go up. She stands out only because she's wearing a red dress and because there's a spotlight on her. Elizabeth Taylor would have stood out even if she'd been wearing a frumpy housecoat in the pitch dark.

Flat script, direction

It would be easy to attribute the film's failure to Lohan, but despite the inadequacy of her performance, the fault lies elsewhere. Monger's script is superficial and flat, and Lloyd Kramer's direction erratic and uninspired.

The film compartmentalizes the public and presumed private lives of Taylor and Burton with little sense of the whole and little sense of who these people really were. We are told that they were in love and that their outsize personalities exhausted both that love and each other. Yet we don't see or feel it.

The entire "Inside the Actor's Studio"-like framing device is pointless, so much so that it virtually disappears for the middle part of the film, only to rear its empty head toward the end.

How much more fertile it could have been if Monger had framed the story in that postdivorce "Private Lives" tour. Yes, it would have been somewhat obvious, but no more so than the gimmicks that lard Monger's script as it is. But perhaps it would have forced Kramer and Monger, not to mention Lohan, to stand back and think seriously about Taylor and Burton as characters whose addiction to attention prevented them from having their own private lives, either individually or as a couple.